once there are owls, there are owlers…each in his or her own little, seasonally-inflated bubble of owl wonderment. 

sometimes though, the sharp needle of reality has a tendency to burst an owler’s bubble.  i think that happened to me last night. 

there i was, all caffeined up and chock-full of non-nutritive foodstuffs, swaddled in three layers of stinky fleece.  it was perfect.  it was the night before the super moon and the weather had two thumbs up, written all over it.  plus, there has been owls.

so far this season, i have experienced contentment, dare i say bliss, during my nocturnal immersions.  i feel like a springtime participant again, and not the indentured servant whose sole function was to make the forest service look like they were doing their job. 

yet, even on the nights when a real job isn’t looming with the next sunrise and i can dawdle into the wee hours, it helps to have some acoustical accompaniment during my nocturnal forays… just a song or two, some chatter, perhaps a bit of owl squabble to let me know there is a purpose behind my owling obsessiveness.  i was hoping for that last night, but came painfully short of my goal. 

interestingly, on my route last night, i was able to rekindle the excitement i felt during my early years when surveys were heavy on discovery.  i could remember the intact landscape and me coursing through it in archaic outerwear, intent on figuring things out.   those nights were data sheet-filling expeditions into the unknown, when i first recognized the pattern and connectivity between owl song and owl behavior.  but even then, there were nights when nothing sang, nothing demanded attention, nothing happened. 

silent nights were wholly nights that were highly unwelcome.

sorry.

it was a beautiful night last night and yet, i was disappointed when it ended at 0100.  i felt fine and mentally sharp.  my back had yet to seize up on me (a function of hours of standing immobile in the middle of the road, like a doofus) and the caffeine provided mental acuity and an everlasting ability to scent mark the night. 

yet, only one (lowly) barred owl provided diversion. 

in my 5 hours, i did not see or hear another person.  my thoughts did not wander.  i was focused on where i was and why i was there.  i was content. 

in this my 25th owl spring, i am coming to grips with my owling and so, i am coming to grips with myself at a time when i really need to do just that.  

it feels good to be in my bubble again.

next:  when supermoons go bad.

the landscape was perfectly still last night.

nothing stirred. 

the snowglobe reconsidered its purpose.

i love nights like this, early in the season.  they set the threshold for acoustical acceptance.  even distant saw-whet songs carry unfettered to the land-based listener.

purpose.

i can’t state that enough.  noise must have purpose for it to be removed from the category of noise.

often on still nights, when there are no sounds, my mind creates them for me.  i hear the saw-whet, the boreal, the great gray. i go to sleep with monotonous toots and ascending stacattos lulling my brain to complacency.     

before midnight, i was standing in one of my favorite areas of many favorite areas.  i don’t need to bore you with whimsical retellings of “once, there were owls here”, but once, there were owls there. 

i stood in bright moonlight, in the sharp shadows of spring. 

my hearing was perfectly focused.

in the distance, i heard the sound of rushing water where no water existed.  

the roar of meltwater grew, then raised above the plain of the earth.  limbs creaked, and the initial gusts of an advancing coldfront slapped against my skin with pulses of pure air.

it was invigorating and sensually complete.  sound, touch, sight, smell.

no owls, but that was okay.

twenty seconds into my first stop last night, a saw-whet sang from a clump of aspen on the distant side of a recent ahh…”anthropogenic disturbance.” 

twenty seconds into my fourth stop, the winds picked up and owl song was lost. 

the harmonics of wind through limbs of fir and spruce and pine creates acoustic chaos.  you swear you hear song, yet it is not the organized song of a plaintive male owl. there is no pattern. pattern begets detection begets purpose (for an owler in the north woods during a march night). 

once upon a time, the area i surveyed was a vast, contiguous stretch of boreal forest. contiguous forest, however, appears to have been misplaced over the past two decades. 

pulpwood.  windstorms. gravity. 

many places i visit i could apply the same description and for me, change in the landscape has mostly been unforgiving.  i want every thing to be the way it was when i had unbounded exuberance and rewards for my 10 hours in the night. 

 nothing ever hurts as much as it did when the pain occurred.  owling is never as good as it once was. 

anecdotes are my polaris now.  they will guide me and be honed and crafted and i am sure, retold over and over again.  somewhere in the archives of my blogs, my old posts probably bear that out.

 “didn’t he say that somewhere else?”

 “why yes. yes i did.  thank you for noticing.”

 just one boreal, for old time’s sake.

refamiliarizing myself with the night takes only a few seconds.  

orbits of acoustics and olfaction.  

even though it is 2 miles away, lake superior creates a grumbling background noise.  distant pulses of waves into rock.

 moonlight.

 the musk of mustellids lingers like the smoke of an extinguished candle.

 the landscape is locked deep beneath snow and ice.  the spring thaw has begun, but bare earth is weeks away.  within pronounced watersheds, the pressure of moving water can be felt.  there is nothing acoustic about it.  winter groans its surrender.

twenty five years.

twenty minutes into the night, with a fog hanging close to the road, a saw-whet owl sings lazily.  “hey baby…i got the goods.  uh huh.” 

there is no hurry on my first night back.  there are no vehicles in mad transit.  no ambience, save for that created by an overworked forest on a mid-march evening, when spring makes her presence known. 

i think of boreals.  i am unable to do otherwise. 

 at the top of a draw i pause, then hear the deep, booming bass of a great gray.  it is heard and felt on still air.

at midnight, the winds pick up and the temperature rises 4 degrees.  the fog is gone. a fox yelps, then marks his territory.   

when i tuck my data sheets away, i am content.  there were no boreals, but the great gray served as a reminder of the way things were.   

for some reason, knowing that i don’t have to survey makes surveying all the more palatable. 

at least for one night.

on march 25, 1987, on a night claustrophobic with clouds and darkness, i sat in my truck at the end of a stretch of asphalt.  with lights off, nothing was familiar and in an instant, i became a stranger in a strange land.   

months of preparation and apprehension and procrastination stirred in my cerebral blender.  i knew what i was going to do, yet had not fully come to accept why i was going to do it. 

with the engine shut off, i stepped out of the overheated cab and stood alone in the cold and the dark.  i was the only person in the world. 

with that tentative first step my life changed irrevocably.  

since then, i have spent the past 24 springs  listening for songs and calls of purpose.  owl songs in an owl spring.  

darkness. moonlight. sickness. health. life. death. joy. despair. depression. elation. contempt. lucidity. wisdom. disdain. exuberance. bliss. confusion.

 the privilege has not been lost on me. 

to put it all into perspective, consider this:  since 1987, i have surveyed over 7,000 miles in 0.5 mile increments; 3 minutes per stop or well over 14,000 stops in a sometimes noisy, and sometimes silent landscape.  i have spent 40 (plus) consecutive 24-hour periods simply listening for owls.  throw in radio telemetry, behavior indexing, nest visits, nest box construction, banding and damn, it’s no wonder i am completely dysfunctional outside of the owling season. 

2011 will be my 25th year.  or will it? 

my passion has eroded and i am easily distracted. the boreal owl, the focus of my passion is largely gone now and i have had a hard time dealing with its absence. once, the owl was a constant nocturnal companion.  now, my surveys have turned into saw-whet extravaganzas.  trucks backing up in the night….the beep beep beeps of hormonally-charged cavity nesters. 

little bastards. 

funding from the forest service is gone. they have dangled a vehicle at me for 2011, but i consider it an insult.  they clamor for my data knowing that without it, there is no federal finger on the pulse that is the northern forest owl community.  take a look at the national forest management act of 1978 and you will see what is required of those in the khaki and green.  all along, i guess i have been doing much of their work for them. 

for most of the winter, while immersed in sweat-induced nordic jaunts or just sitting in my chair, i have come perilously close to saying “fuck it.”  i have sought counsel.  i have tried to be a strigidaen optimist.  i couldn’t make up my mind on whether to continue. 

then the answer came and it seemed easy. 

i have to do it for me.